[Editor's Note: The Shelton High School administration has declared that James Tate can go to prom.]

“We’ve seen this before.”

That’s something few people could’ve said as word of teen James Tate’s ban from a Connecticut high school prom swept the nation last week, triggering a national outcry.

Yet for Tamarah Evanko, a Branford, Conn.-based attorney who has offered her legal services pro bono to help Tate attend the big dance despite a stern “No” from administrators, the tale is strangely familiar.

Three years ago, Evanko helped navigate a senior at another Connecticut high school through a similar situation by filing an injunction against that town’s Board of Education. Whereas Tate was suspended for trespassing on school grounds, Hamden High School senior Kadijah Ketchum in 2008 was suspended for running in the hallway at school.

“The similarities to me are that in Ketchum, she was facing a suspension that was for a very, very minor infraction,” Evanko, a Hamden resident, told Patch. "The reaction of the governing body, the administration, was just so overboard, it's like suspension that I see for the Tate, for putting up these signs. There's no damage to the building. There is nothing permanent. He wasn't making threats, he wasn't causing real harm. It was a really minor incident and they rose this to the level of a suspension, and even that fact that it was an in-school suspension tells me that they didn't take it seriously either."

In the 2008 Ketchum case, Evanko took said she attempted to negotiate some sort of settlement quitely with the school board of Hamden and the principal of the high school. But school officials wouldn't sit down to talk, she said.

"They were holding tight to what they had to say and they were not interested even in having discussion," Evanko said. "We finally filed an injunction against keeping her out of prom for this [infraction]. One point I made was that it was a minor infraciton that did not rise to the spirit of the punishment. I understand they were trying to keep bad children out of these proms, but what they are doing is catching everyody else."

When the injunction was granted on behalf Ketchum, a judge ordered Evanko and her husband, Robert, who works as business manager and paralegal at Evanko & Associates, LLC, to attend prom with their client. That prom was held at Aqua Turf in Southington.

Tamarah Evanko told Patch that to attend the Hamden prom "very, very interesting."

"It was the same exact location as what we [lawyers] call the Barristers Ball, and it's akin to the law shool prom," she recalled. "I had just finished one Barristers Ball and had gone to one the year prior. For me, that [prom night with her client] was a lot of sitting in the car and figuring out exactly what am I doing here."

"It was very interesting to see the kids and what they were wearing, and all that wonderful excitement about prom," said Evanko, who still talks to Ketchum's mother. "Everyone was in lovely cars. We got the vibe of the excitement and just attending was exciting."

Once Evanko walked inside with her client, a member of the school faculty pulled her aside, she recalled.

"She said, 'I am so glad you did this. I couldn't say anything about it but I'm glad you took the step you did and glad it worked," she said.